This year the plague is real
Every year for Passover, we host a seder and invite people from all backgrounds to join us as we remember when we were slaves in Egypt. We tell the story of the Exodus so that our children realize their freedom is precious.
When Tin arrived in my life, our seder became more multicultural as we blended the narrative of African enslavement in this country with the Jewish enslavement in the old country.
I love the ritual and symbolism of this holiday even as I have modernized it to accommodate health issues (gluten free matzo – surprisingly great) and a more inclusive seder plate:
The typical seder plate has a roasted egg (fertility), parsley (hope), salt water for the tears of our oppression, a lamb shank bone to symbolize the 10th plague and how God passed over the houses of Hebrews who marked their thresholds with blood, the maror, which is the bitter herb of our oppression, and haroset, which is the mortar used in physical labor under the Egyptians.
We add:
Orange – women and LGBTQ community who have been marginalized in Jewish tradition.
Banana – favorite food of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi who washed ashore fleeing his war-torn homeland Syria in solidarity with the 60 million refugees worldwide. (My paternal grandmother was born in Aleppo.)
Olives – solidarity with the Palestinians.
Beet – for the vegetarians.
Collards and Chicken Bone: Freedom Seders: collards to represent the gardens of enslaved Africans, a chicken bone to represent the last meals made by African Americans fleeing the South during the Great Migration, their last Southern cooked meal being fried chicken. The salt water also represents the waters of the Middle Passage that brought the enslaved Africans to live under oppression.
This year, we have our matzo and most of the ingredients for our seder plate, AND we also have a plague. If these were biblical times, we’d say this plague was sent by God to destroy an evil pharaoh. Perhaps in these non biblical times, we could say the plague came and forever broke the shackles of our over scheduled prisons.
